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Hence, when Microsoft talked about piracy recently, few, if any remembered, that the company's own co-founder, Bill Gates, once admitted that he watched pirated movies on YouTube.
Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software... Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
The next decade appears to have arrived. With income streams falling, Microsoft is now looking to go after customers who have, in Gates' own words, become "sort of addicted".
A last gem from Gates: his famous whine in 1976 during which he invented one thing which everyone agrees he really did - the term "software piracy."
This whine, mind you, was about a version of the BASIC programming language that Gates and the other co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, sold as their first product at Micro-Soft (that was the company's name when it started business). Gates' and Allen's BASIC was a modified version of Dartmouth BASIC which had been put into the public domain by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.
Just think: if BASIC been released by Kemeny and Kurtz under a licence similar to the GPL, then Allen and Gates would have had to release all their own source code too!
But let's get back to the present. Some of the quotes from Microsoft, when announcing its latest anti-piracy initiative, are comical to say the least.
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Let me skip the obvious tautology about a "genuine copy". I'm not exactly sure how a pirated copy of Windows, Office or any of the other delightful software packages sold by Microsoft, is any less secure than the original.
Take Windows XP, for example. All three service packs are available freely on the internet – you don't have to go to the Windows Update website to get it. And if you run XP with all three service packs as an ordinary user, that's about the best (mind you, that's a highly relative term) security that Windows can offer. You'd have to add anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-adware applications but you can get those as freeware. And then you'd have to touch wood and hope for the best.
To begin with, if you buy Windows from the company or retailers, it is as insecure as it ever was. A company that has been in the software business for more than 30 years was forced to admit recently that it messed up security in its latest Windows version, Windows 7.
If we get into a discussion of the devastating bugs that have wreaked havoc on every version of Windows since the internet came along, then this article would stretch to being a full-length book. If you're interested in the horror list, have a peek here.
People like me, who have lived in Asia and the Middle East, have seen how piracy has operated first-hand. When I bought my first computer in 1989, an IBM-XT, the retailer brought out a typed list of software and asked me what I wanted. It did not cost a cent – not even the operating system which I recall was MS-DOS 3.3. And there were no software police around either. In those days, Microsoft never mentioned a word about piracy.
Eighteen months later, when I upgraded to a 386-SX, the situation was the same. I actually chose the retailer based on the list of software they could offer - one chap had a 45-page list and the other had a 53-page list. There were no installation programs for the applications – you just made a directory and used a wild card to copy all the files for the application and then ran the executable from a DOS prompt. I think it was Harvard Graphics which was the tipping point when it came to deciding on the PC – the vendor who had that program got my order.
I have seen the same thing, on a much bigger scale, in India and Sri Lanka, as recently as last August. In countries like these, if software had only been sold, Windows would never have gained the user base it has. The same goes for China.
By contrast, when I bought my third PC, in October 1995, a direct import from the US, I had to pay for the software, most of which was bundled with the PC. I wasn't told about the cost of Windows 95, it was part of the bundle. I was a Windows user then.
Looking back at all this, why are people surprised that Australians think it's okay to use pirated software for personal use? I really can't figure it out – and what I've listed is only a fraction of the double-talk from Microsoft. But I would certainly be interested in your views, gentle reader.
